Ivan
Suvanjieff
SPAIN
“Whatever his mode of expression, he constantly stands for free expression in a world dominated by the single thought and the established norm.”
Ivan Suvanjieff is a multifaceted artist and painter. His most recent solo exhibition, "Quanta Dada" was held on the French Riviera in June of 2021, and his paintings have recently been exhibited in Barcelona, Berlin, London, and California as well. In 2001, Archbishop Desmond Tutu honored Ivan by presiding over his wedding ceremony at St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town, South Africa.
There is motion at your front door
Suvanjieff’s first exhibition was held in Denver, Colorado in 1991, where he lived and worked as an artist painting only in black and white for more than twelve years. This discipline, he states, is the way that he learned to use color.
Who do you think you are?
Ivan now paints with the same Mediterranean inspiration of other artists who blossomed in this region, including Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dali.
“The reason why he created his solo exhibition is Quanta Dada, the new Dadaism."
Suvanjieff has had a career full of success. He also suffers from epilepsy, with seizures almost every day. He is keenly aware of the fact that, if he had been born even 50 years earlier, his voice would have been silenced.
“As a U.S. citizen, people like Suvanjieff with epilepsy were forbidden to marry and sterilization was regularly performed on epileptics, until 1956. He was born in 1957.
Those who saw his epilepsy would have perhaps delivered him to "The Asylum for Epileptics and Epileptic Insane” in Ohio, which was located very close to his hometown.
Your invisible toothbrush
“Apart from an artist, Ivan is also an activist, a musical and literary icon (from Detroit Punk Rock to his literary magazine, ‘The New Censorship’) an award-winning filmmaker, and he has been nominated 17 times for the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Who do you think you are?
The negative stigma associated with the word "epilepsy" continues to be very strong. And for this reason, Suvanjieff always tells everyone he meets that he is an epileptic. It is a part of who he is. It allows him to see the world in a different way.
Pincushion salad
He was drawn to the Dada movement of 1910-1920, a period of intense pictorial and intellectual creativity, which sprang forth 100 years ago in a time which profoundly parallels our own.
Licking Volkswagons
Dada was created in reaction to an era of global pandemic, crushing autocracy, concentration of wealth, mega-corporate power, and a world on the brink of destruction.
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“In 2017 he moved to the North-eastern tip of Costa Brava, Spain, just ten miles from the border with France.”
Bare-Breasted Time Travel
The parallels to our current lives in the 2020's are both striking and profound. It is time for a new Dadaism which challenges all established norms, Quanta Dada, in this new era where the human voice once again deserves to be defended.
The End of Perfume
The world’s leading expert on Dadaism, Andrei Codrescu, (author of “The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess”) wrote this in a review of Suvanjieff’s Quanta Dada Solo Exhibition: "When I saw Ivan Suvanjieff's work that stream like a quantum computer, I knew that I will never escape from Dada as long as a painter like this can create Quanta Dada!"
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